About J. J. Sedelmaier

As President/Director of J. J. Sedelmaier Productions, Inc., he is responsible for launching some of the most talked about broadcast animated productions of the past two decades – MTV’s “Beavis and Butt-Head”, SNL’s “Saturday TV Funhouse” series with Robert Smigel (“The Ambiguously Gay Duo”, “The X-Presidents”, etc.), Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s “Harvey Birdman - Attorney at Law”, and the “Tek Jansen/Alpha Squad Seven” series for The Colbert Report. Sedelmaier has produced over 500 film and design pieces. In addition, he’s a very organized hoarder.

The Second World War saw the participation of countless corporations steering and converting their talents and resources toward the war effort. At the end of the war, many of these corporations took advantage of their contributions to produce promotional pieces that highlighted their involvement. For instance, the Chrysler Corporation published a four-volume set of...

My last post concerned the photoengraving industry of the pre-Depression period. This week it’s pre-WWII lithography! Litho Media: A Demonstration of the Selling Power of Lithography, published in 1939 by Roger Stephens and edited by H. Homer Buckelmueller and Colin Campbell, is a 206-page, 12-by-15-inch slipcased bible produced to help publicize the successful and...

Anyone following the posts I’ve done for Imprint should be left with the impression that I get off on tasty examples of graphic art. Regardless of how well and even superior the reproduction of images is now, thanks to new technology like the iPad, there’s nothing like leafing through some of the publications that...

I grew up drinking Orange Crush and hearing my mom tell stories of how it used to come in brown bottles, supposedly to protect the flavor. But by the time I was a kid, those days were long gone, and Crush’s bottles were clear. I was also aware that Orange Crush was made in...

In a simpler time, when automobiles went slower and the pre-Eisenhower highway system in the United States was less developed, there was a popular advertising campaign that ran from 1927 until 1963. It consisted of rhymed messages sequentially staked on the right side of the road, all ending with the advertiser’s name, “Burma-Shave.” These...

I became interested in pop bottles (I grew up in the Chicago area where we all said “pop”) and related stuff when I was about 12 years old. I had gone inside an old garage that was attached to a neighborhood house that was being torn down and inside was a cache of un-returned...

With Chicago’s “C2E2″ 2012 ComicCon (http://www.c2e2.com/) approaching this week from April 13-15 at McCormick Place, it seems fitting that I do a piece on an aspect of comic books that everyone even remotely acquainted with the realm knows well – the Johnson Smith & Company of Detroit, Michigan. You may not recognize the firm’s...

When the word “Disney” is mentioned, it’s almost impossible to separate it from the craft of motion picture cartoons. Whether it’s used to describe a multinational entertainment corporation, or it alludes to Walt Disney the man, it’s easily synonymus with the technique of film animation. This was obviously not always the case. In 1920,...

In 1948 Simon and Schuster published a book titled He Drew As He Pleased. It’s a tribute to Albert Hurter, an inspirational sketch artist who worked at the Walt Disney Studio from 1931 until his death in 1942. The book itself was planned and prepared by Hurter himself and as outlined in his will,...

I used to spend a lot of time as a kid visiting antique (actually, “junk”) shops. It was like visiting a museum, except you pick up stuff and hold it. One of the things I found (probably around 1972) was a book by author George Lowther from 1942 about Superman. I’d never heard about...